Our two-year-old grandson has done a lot of traveling in his short life. He was born in Japan. When he was 4 months old, he and his mother traveled from Japan to South Dakota with a stop in Washington to visit family. When he was 19 months old his family moved to South Carolina. He and his mother stayed with us in Washington for a month while their new home was being prepared. He has visited his other grandparents in Virginia a couple of times. He has been to visit friends in Florida. And this week he is visiting us after a 3,000-mile airplane journey.

He is very much at home in his world. He is happy, well-adjusted, secure, and adventurous. As interesting to me as his ability to travel is his sense of security. I watch as our daughter practices routines with him. Certain elements are always a part of preparing for bed in the evening. Certain familiar foods are offered. With his father still at work in South Carolina, the phone is used to video chat with him a couple of times each day. There are rules about behavior that are the same at grandma and grandpa’s home as they are when he is at home.

His mother grew up with a similar style of family travel, though the distances of our trips were much smaller. She made her first visit to Canada when she was about six weeks old. When our children were preschool age, we took them with us when we traveled. They learned to ride in their car seats as we went about our life and work. We were careful to maintain routines. There were familiar toys and books that traveled with us. Bedtime rituals were observed. Meals came at predictable times. There was time for cuddles and storytelling every day.

While it is true that both of our children love to travel, it is also true that they both really enjoy staying at home. Both have worked hard to build stable home lives for their children.

Since I, too, feel a balance between a love of travel and a strong desire to have a home place, I am interested in families that choose different lifestyles. A short tour of YouTube will find no shortage of stories of families who travel full time. One preferred venue is travel in a converted school bus. In general these full-time traveling families put a higher priority on experience over possession. They live a minimalist lifestyle in tiny homes, but have expansive experiences.

One of the things that interests me about the digital nomads who chose to document their lives on YouTube is that while they enjoy travel and have wonderful adventures, the lifestyle is filled with a lot of hard work. YouTube doesn’t often show the hours of sitting over a computer editing video in order to have the appeal necessary to get the “likes” and “subscribes” required to earn money from the platform. Viewers see the highlights of travel, but not the daily grind. Most of the digital nomads I have watched don’t keep up that lifestyle for long periods of time. A common occurrence in the YouTube world is to discover someone who has been making videos for a year or more, follow them for a few months, and then their videos just stop appearing. One nomadic family whose videos I watched, posted two or three videos each week for a year. They chronicled travel through 47 of the lower 48 states. Then one day the videos simply stopped being published. Months passed with no new videos. I don’t know the rest of their story. Maybe someone was injured. Maybe they stopped traveling for health reasons. Maybe they just got tired of the hard work of producing videos and came up with another way to earn their living.

I don’t have any research information, but I suspect that many families who embrace full time travel do so as a season of their lives. They travel for a while and then they have a time when they are more settled. The school bus or camper gets parked and building a home place is pursued with the passion that once was devoted to travel. I believe that some find the constant travel to lack the support of community and the lasting friendships that are critical to children’s growth and development.

Having invested my career in building strong, stable, intergenerational communities, I believe that such community is essential for raising children. I have a strong bias towards religious communities. But I watch our son’s passion for libraries as centers of community and recognize some of the same goals and some of the same work.

Like many things in life, I believe that there is value in balance. Travel and community are not “either or” choices. Giving children experience with both is important as they develop their own skills of discernment and decision making. Increased options of work that is not tied to a specific location gives more choices to families than was the case in our parents’ generation. The pandemic yielded more jobs that could be done from any location than was the case previously. Opportunities for remote learning and homeschooling expanded in the face of rapidly spreading disease. At this point in the pandemic, however, we are encountering more and more families who have discovered some of the limits of isolation. I know children and teens who have no interest in more opportunities for Zoom or FaceTime. Virtual community has its limits, especially when children are involved.

We won’t be going back to the way things were before the pandemic, but in-person experiences are still critical to the development of community. Careful planning is required for safe gathering. Children need a sense of familiarity. They require reliable and consistent social contacts in order to develop basic trust. Care needs to be given to planning for their education and developing networks of support. Lasting friendships need to be pursued and supported.

Human cultures are always shifting. Exciting changes are occurring in work and family life. It is fascinating to watch and study those changes. But it is also interesting to see what remains. I believe that home will continue to be important to the development of children long into the future. Even the nomads are traveling towards home.